The invention relates to an apparatus for the production of exposed and metallized substrates for the creation of master discs, which contains in series a disc lacquering station, a laser beam recorder, a developing station and a metallizer.
Apparatus of the above kind are presently being used for producing optically readable information media, especially compact discs, and they are generally known. In them the individual stations are arranged in tandem, so that the substrates can be transported successively and automatically from one station to the following station. It is a disadvantage in that case that the laser beam exposure of a substrate takes considerably more time than the operations to be performed on the rest of the stations. It might therefore be conceivable to equip an apparatus with a plurality of laser beam recorders so as to avoid undesirable slowing of production. Then, however, apparatus were developed which were considerably too expensive for many users to whom high production rates were not important.